Her Garden Seethes
by delladella
Summary: The dust from Meteor has yet to clear, and Shin-Ra is scrambling to reassert its power. While the Cetra scheme and Cloud and company attempt to move on, the world poises on the brink of war. A wounded Planet is a dangerous one. OGC.
1. The Number of the Serpent

Four long years of fighting through the jungle.

The men are dead. Old men hobbled by age and gnarled by arthritis join the battle. They wear bombs the way children cling to a parent, and you are lucky to see them. Sephiroth has. They give no warning; they say nothing. They rise from prayer—they should do penance, but they're praying for death instead—and explode.

Where is the honor in that? None. Why did he think there should be? How silly of him.

Death is bleeding and stinking and fouling yourself. It is swearing on everything, up and down, shrieking that you are going to change for the better, when there is no time for change and no god that bargains with the likes of you. Nothing could serve to ennoble death. He remembers whose lives he is responsible for.

Damn the rest.

Sephiroth considers the newcomer shrouded in a mosquito net, the latest in a round of undue entry-level promotions to SOLDIER. Fair, Zack. When the bodies start to drop, the foolish and the feeble rocket through the ranks—a fact of protracted warfare.

Zack Fair is one such fool. "Nothing like they tell you on the teevee," he says, in that little, laughing voice that comes on in moments of hysteria. "That's for sure."

_Sixteen._ Sephiroth is stropping the Masamune in the gaslight. Keeping track of minutiae in the middle of a warzone has gone from a matter of course into a full-blown compulsion. When events around him are careening out of hand, he soothes himself with that feeling of controlling everything.

There are five hundred infantrymen in the battalion and fifty SOLDIERs amid them, for instance. There are seven tribes that rule over all Wutai, one of which still stands. There is more than one life for Sephiroth to lose, but that is for another day.

Thinking about that will distract him from the purpose of this memory.

"These damn Wutes—gotta hand it to 'em, sir. They're good."

Ah. There.

And Zack Fair has just made his seventeenth attempt at small talk. Suspicion has gotten to be routine at the outset, and nerves are surely in play. But seventeen is a compelling number of times, when even once strikes Sephiroth as being overmuch. "Spare me whatever you're on about and face front," he says.

But Fair will go on to figure to an extent that Sephiroth did not anticipate. This, he thinks now, is the first failure. Fair hails from the tiny backwoods town of Gongaga, as Sephiroth will later learn when he cares to listen. If not the consummate soldier, he is at least the consummate country bumpkin: laidback, outgoing, uncouth.

Yet there is something exceptional about him, perhaps his sheer persistence. For that moment, Sephiroth thinks Fair might be one of Heidegger's little plants sent to stick close and spy on him.

Four long years, and they are nearing the end. Women and children spring from the underbrush pointing guns; they go down screaming, _Wutai, Wutai._ Smoke them out—it's gone past an order into an axiom, a way of life. And vicious as they are, their scorched and bullet-riddled bodies are not so easy to step over. Their deaths, though deserved, take a toll on his forces.

Back home, they have mothers and sisters, fathers and brothers.

Four long years is enough to make animals of anybody.

The ways of these people are not so foreign. Sephiroth understands them. He has visited a great dishonor upon Godo Kisigari by staying the killing blow. Sephiroth will leave him alive so that Shin-Ra will make of him a smiling figurehead, complicit in the desecration of his ancestral lands.

Across the plaza, he spots a woman in an elaborate headdress and kimono; looking back, where all of them have started to look the same, broad-faced and sloe-eyed, a little sinister, her face recalls somebody from a fight that will come much later. If he had known this at the time, he thinks it would have been another clue.

For now, the Lady of Wutai is summoning.

He conjures a quake to shatter the ground around her, and her cry rings out true to memory. Kisigari staggers to reach her.

Sephiroth has lost precious seconds watching this little play; he knows now, as he knew then, that his fascination is cheap and he should finish her sooner to avoid what will come, but he does not change a thing. He waits until Kisigari draws within feet of her, flung forward by the jagging of rocks, and deep-fries her with a third-level bolt.

Not soon enough, of course.

Out of the pagoda, a small child comes crying. Lady Kisigari does not waste a second making her goodbyes. She whisks her husband and child into the safety of the summoner's void, leaving herself stranded behind, dying witness to what she has done.

The light of the summon explodes into substance. The Water God is fifty or more feet of sinew undulating beneath gleaming belly-white scales; it is a nightmare that lifts in broad arcs of its never-ending back from the river that runs through the capital, displacing enough water to flood the plaza a half-foot deep. Its whiskered snout snakes out a black, bifurcated tongue to taste the air, and it knows its quarry in an instant.

It is Sephiroth.

And then there is Zack Fair.

"Out of my way," Sephiroth says.

Zack lifts off his feet and into the air like a child's balloon. He's protesting. "What am I supposed to do?"

Sephiroth hears himself say, "Live. Hide," but now he thinks,_ You do nothing for me_. _Better that you die_. The Planet's memories are those of every thinking being that has ever drawn breath. This shared past can be studied from as many angles, but it cannot really be changed.

It's too bad.

Behind Leviathan rides the tide, cresting and receding, dragging bodies like garbage along the surf. The Lady of Wutai is lost to the waves, but Sephiroth thinks she must have been good to sustain a summon, to call forth an emanation of the Planet to do battle in earnest, trading blow for blow.

They are still here after the waves come crashing across the plaza, wiping the city clean.

He floats to the ground. He is going to fight a god, then. He has still-standing personnel to support him in this, those who have scrabbled to rooftops to wait out the waves, but they are liabilities, and they are running scared.

Leviathan's jaws snap and rend what it doesn't wholly consume. Boots and shins are all that remain.

Four long years. The serpent swings its tail and takes out a line of residences and storefronts. He plunges the Masamune into its underbelly and twists before leaping clear. It goes down flailing. Men who stand with him cheer and whoop in exultation, as do some of the shell-shocked natives rising from the waterlogged wreckage. Over at last, over at last.

Now he knows what to watch for. Now he knows to wait.

A bright flash blanks out the battlefield around him—the first spark, he once thought, of an ultima. But the green, shrieking surge of energy will never come clapping together and exploding above them, and now he knows. In that wasted split-second where he has bothered to slam up barriers around everybody—lives he no longer worries for—he deviates from memory. He wills himself to look up, squinting into the brief light in search of something.

He thrills to see it. He thinks he understands.

It is the eye of the Planet watching him, extrapolating a future from that instant and knowing him for all he will go on to do—and yet it only stares. He takes that for tacit approval—and what else? He knows what it wants now; it wants for their destruction.

In a blink, it has vanished, leaving him to the past.

"Thank god that's over with," Zack Fair says.

It's enough to make Sephiroth laugh.

* * *

Tifa watched from the stockroom as dancers packed back to back on the dance floor and darted apart like a school of slick fish, each movement of their bodies to the beat. She remembered what it felt like to lose herself in the motions that way.

_Nothing like dancing._ She'd been fighting for her life those days.

A ripple went through the crowd, and the little portal in the door fogged with her breath. At first she doubted her eyes.

There, headlong like a prow and pushing against the tide—five-deep, ten-deep, into the thick of them. Asking questions at the bar.

_Cloud._

She almost dropped an armful of boxes.


	2. Cloud Nine

Cloud trailed Tifa up the stairs to the apartment in silence. The world didn't stop when he went away, and she'd wanted to prove that by going ahead and opening the bar without him.

_But you're here now, _she thought, _and I'm fine, and I've forgotten all about how mad I am. _

Her hand shook. It took two jabs with the key to unlock the door. "I think you'll like how it turned out up here." She crossed into a world limned by moonlight's graceful silver pen. Its ink seeped through the gauzy curtains of the apartment and slicked along the outlines of the furniture. "Nice," she said, "but nothing too—"

That was when door slammed behind her, sending a wall-mounted picture of a sunrise in Costa del Sol skewing to the side. _This again._ Her eyes were on that picture while she squeezed the keyring till it marked her palm like a burning brand, squeezed till it made no jingling sound at all.

"Cloud." Only he could help build a bar and look surprised to find people in it, though she guessed she was impressed he'd held it together long enough to make it upstairs.

He'd put his back against door as if to brace it, and now he put his cheek to it. He said, "Look somewhere else, or it won't stop," and then he got back to panting—so quiet about it, too. Half his power to disappear was the dark, and maybe soon he'd achieve a hush so perfect it defied her ears.

_Wake up_, she wanted to tell him, and maybe she wanted to shake him. _Why did we bother, if this is what we'll do with our time?_

She hung there midstep in the foyer. A good friend would slip out of her apron and stir up a drink and do whatever it took to pretend there wasn't a problem. She put down her foot. He had funny ideas about what friends should do, and she'd never counted herself one of them—not in dreams, hardly in deeds. Her stare was as direct as a punch.

At the yank of a tassel, lamplight spread through the den, chasing out the darkest shadows. _Home, Cloud. See?_ She reached out but fell short of touching him. "It's okay." Her voice caught in a way that wouldn't convince anybody.

He nodded once and let out a breath and with it, it seemed, the worst of the tension. "Cloud Nine?" he asked. That was what she'd called the bar.

"That's right." She took his raincoat and hung it on the rack next to her apron. "Maybe I've got a thing for the odd ones." And the badly dressed ones, at that. "Do you really have to ask?"

"Yes, no, maybe. Yes, no, maybe. You'll know as soon as I do, Tifa." He sounded tired. Where had he gone? What had he done? What had been so important that it could keep him from her? He paused by the bookcase and said nothing—only noticed—then leaned over the wet bar and splashed his face.

She'd been filling the shelves with every pop psychology book she could get her hands on lately.

Up here, the stylings of the house band were muffled thuds on a drum and the faraway keen of a saxophone, music to match the downbeat mood. She stopped to plunk a few keys on her piano. Yes, no, maybe—he could say that and be cute about it, but wasn't that just the trouble with them?

"You really surprised me tonight." She hesitated on a flat, drawing out the note. "I wondered," she said. Worry was the better word. "Maybe you'd see what I'd done to the place and turn back the way you came."

He wiped his hands down his pant legs. His gloves were bundled by the little flowering cactus he'd potted in a coffee tin; anything less hardy would've died of neglect by this point. "The place is nice. The customers, though." He filled a bowl from the sink. "If I didn't know better I'd think management was pumping in nerve gas down there. Those kids looked like they were having seizures."

"It's called dancing." She shrugged. "Now I know you're turning all of twenty-two in a few weeks, but you don't have to be so crotchety. In fact, I sure could use a bouncer to straighten them all out."

He let water slip over the lip of bowl and into the coffee tin, screwing up an eye as if in careful measurement. "You want live customers. That lightshow makes me think alarms are going off. Me as your doorman, you're going to have one really exclusive club."

"Just because there's a dance floor doesn't make it a club."

"Whatever you want to call it. Light a fire in the backdrop, and I've had nightmares that looked like that."

"Come on, Cloud. Remember how much fun we had this summer? Settling down and picking up some work would be good for you. How about bartending?"

He went on poking at that bright, waxy bloom on the cactus, and there was something obscene about the attention he paid to the damn thing, no matter how squinchy-eyed or clinical, more than he'd shown in her in months. And when she really thought about it? Years.

"This one's ramifying," he said. "Perfectly."

"What's it?" She frowned. He didn't want for little hobbies; in fact, he pursued them as if they were the solution to all life's problems.

"The offshoots are all equidistant. And it's already flowering. It used to be you could only find this cactus in arid places like outside the Gold Saucer, but now that the rain's drying up everywhere, I think this little guy's got what it takes."

"You know what? Just forget I said it. It figures I'd name a bar after somebody who hates it." Craving a drink, she snatched the detergent from the cabinet. No clean glasses, of course. If he took note of these telling halts in housekeeping, he failed to mention them, nor did he really seem to mind.

What did he ever mind?

"I was telling you what I was interested in," he said, "instead of arguing with you about what you'd like me to do."

She reached over his shoulder to crank the spigot and brushed his back.

He froze. So did she.

Heartbeats measured the moment. One, two—so fast. She lingered that way, weighing against him while her hand clutched chrome, more desperate than she'd realized.

"Tifa."

She almost laughed. He smelled like he'd been rolling around in dirt and wet underbrush, and she knew better than to discount the possibility of that.

Enough. She opened her eyes.

He was grasping both sides of the sink and ducking the wall-length mirror behind the wet bar.

This was how it was. She'd wrapped her arms around him on heedless occasions—_we won, we lived, it's love_—only to feel him go rigid, a sudden statue of himself. And yet the bare round of his shoulder fit beneath her palm like a mold had been cast just for her touch. "One day, you'll see yourself. What I see." She gave a good squeeze and drew away.

He stayed hunched over the sink like she'd gut-punched him. The water steamed. She thought of shouting, stomping, anything to get an answer from him. He tugged on his gloves without betraying himself, helping the effort by refusing to look at her.

"You were wrong that day, you know." She hooked him as he went sidling past. They were four months into this, whatever it was, and the part she owned she put up to her cowardice. "I fought for more than just memories."

He spared another second to frown, and then his eyes slid toward the sofa, and the rest of him followed.

Now her hands clenched under the dishwater, enough to risk cracking the glasses she meant to wash. He would never tell her so, but he hated being touched by anybody.

She knew what was wrong. She knew who'd done this to them. It was supposed to be over. Now the only passion she'd get from Cloud was when he had a damned panic attack in the bar they'd spent all summer building so he could _leave_ it. This was their life together. She couldn't believe it.

"Sorry," he said.

She pulled her hands from the water and flicked them dry. "Don't start."

"For being gone so long. I didn't mean to be."

Just like that, he could blunt the bright edge of her anger and leave her with nothing.

This was how it was. She wondered how long she could stand it and if it meant something good about her, the longer she was able. She reached into the ice bucket with a pair of tongs and poured two glasses of whiskey, one for her nerves; she'd gone from rage to dejection too fast to keep the slight trembling from her movements. The other glass she handed off to Cloud in—_oh_—a brush of fingers.

She wanted out of grade school. Desperately.

"I like it." He gestured with the glass. "What you've done with the place."

"Don't just tell me what I want to hear. Do you really?"

That was when the song switched downstairs to something bass-heavy, bone-jarring, blaring. He broke from his posture in a start, gripping the armrest for want of a hilt or maybe just to keep from launching off the sofa.

"Boo," she said, and they laughed a little. "Needless to say, I don't get to bed much before closing. Might've thought about soundproofing the place a little better, oh, you master builder, you."

"Only the best for you, Tifa." He gave a go-figure sort of shrug. "Can't say I would've pegged Kalm for much of a nightlife, though."

The leather cushion hissed beneath her when she sat, careful to leave space between them. "All those refugees from Midgar, you know. Good for business, but the locals hate it."

"Townsfolk for you. So what's with your help?"

"Not Mandy again." Tifa frowned.

"She said I was shorter than she'd been led to believe. I had to break it to her that I only wear heels occasionally."

Tifa hid her smirk behind a sip. "Sorry I missed that."

"And what else? Ah: also that I'd done a shoddy job on the shelving. Which I sort of agree with. I didn't really see how bad until tonight, but the liquor on the wall isn't level." He spread his arms. "Also that you should dress me. She was pretty adamant about that."

Mandy disapproved of the iffy games Tifa and Cloud played whenever Tifa let slip a little detail about the two of them, but for tonight she seemed to have acquired a telling taste for picking on him. Tifa couldn't blame her. And that raincoat was atrocious. "Well, what can I say? Bright orange—really not your color."

"What matters is that I got it for free. I found it where they used to run up and down the lanes in Junon doing semaphore, and it fit."

"You'll wear anything that fits, huh? I remember a certain tailor down in Wall Market who knew all about _that._"

"You say something, Tifa?"

She laughed.

"There's only one kind of guy that puts on a dress. Secure in his manhood. Steely as … steel. That's me."

"Don't mind Mandy. I know how it goes. She just thinks you're too good to be true."

"Huh." He considered the drink like it had soured before his eyes. "I didn't think that was a problem any more."


	3. A Little World Made Cunningly

Sephiroth waited on the steps of the Nibelheim reactor, an illusion he'd willed into being. He might've admired his unwitting part in the Planet's scheme if he wasn't so insulted by it.

_What shall I do, Mother? This idiot Planet is like a child throwing tantrums, and we're bound to it so long as we're in pieces._

Mother did not speak any more, though he'd had a body—once, twice—and had thrilled to the sound of her song in every cell in him. She was a senseless, brainless creature now, made dumb by division, so much of her spread thin. She was in him—the parts of her that mattered most—and wasted on Zack, on whom she had no effect other than to make him unfit to be recycled into the lifestream like the rest of the human trash.

"Your murderer's bound to join us. Have you thought about that?" And his father—_ha_—his father who was responsible for infecting the lot of them. His pathetic father who'd wielded the needle against himself in a desperate bid to become what he could not control.

A damned mess was what it was—and intolerably boring. When Sephiroth had arrived here—the less said about how, the better—the nothingness had stretched around him, black and without end. He had come to appreciate a certain failing of his, that no matter how far he rose above the frailties of the flesh, the distorted lens of human perception stuck like a cataract, never lifting from his sight.

If there were such a thing as time, then he had walked for hours, only to discover no meaningful thing such as distance. He had only to turn at any moment and see the accursed crowd of clones he'd sought to leave behind.

Unthinking, stupid beings could be pent up without suffering, but Sephiroth—who thought and felt, no less created—how he suffered in such a place. Of those who lived through the fires in Nibelheim to become subjects in the second phase of the Jenova Project, he'd sent a good bit here by the edge of his sword.

Hojo liked to snicker and say they'd all been quarantined by the Cetra, and Sephiroth supposed it was true. The Cetra had gotten smarter about the way they dealt with the infection, but the Planet could never rid itself of them. They wouldn't be allowed to recycle back to the Planet's surface as new beings, since the Planet would first have to embrace their substance, nor were they released to drift along the lifestream's lazy green currents as Sephiroth had done once before.

Having little to do but wait, outside all existence, he'd fashioned a kingdom of boredom, population a couple thousand. Goddamn them all (and so he could, except that he was capable of great mercy). And where else to seat the capital of such a cesspool but Nibelheim? An entire town and its stupid, slackjawed populace, a whole cast of yokels in full costume—bit parts in a greater story, every forgettable detail redrawn for the sake of semblance, a work of art wasted on a trifling subject.

After a time, he'd grown to feel at home here—but that was beside the point. The sad fact was that he'd resigned himself to an eternity spent lording over an illusory kingdom and looked forward only to Cloud's arrival, the chance to repay that stupid and uppity puppet for what he'd ruined.

Of course a Reunion under quarantine would trap Sephiroth here forever, but so long as Holy surrounded this place, he knew he could not escape.

Mother was in the dying clones—dying because Cloud could not control them as Sephiroth could—and those were the outs that dwindled by the day. If he could escape quarantine and reach the lifestream proper, he could do more than see through their eyes and know as they knew; he could become them, if he wanted to, and take their bodies for his own. He'd learned the hard way that Cloud was going to be no good for that any more.

But it hadn't occurred to Sephiroth that the Cetra's setting up quarantine was a desperate bid to forestall whatever solution the Planet had in mind; now he understood. Sorting through his memories had proven worthwhile.

_Fate: so very interesting. It doesn't seem to care whether you realize you're playing along or not._

* * *

Tifa left her seat for the window. Beyond Kalm's moonlit plaza, towards the outlying edges of the town, she saw the newly erected houses, sturdy frames of plain pine and driven nails. The warm splash of liquor settled in her stomach. "See how much we got done out there on the homestead? Reeve's got volunteers coming in from all over. He's had an idea, too." Something they could do together, something they could get passionate about. She turned to Cloud with a look that dared to hope.

And ended up blinking.

He was staring deep into his glass of whiskey. She was just about to snap at him when the silence served the tip-off. "So?" he said to her.

"So we won't just be building homes any more. We'll do bigger and better. I'm pretty excited. Even thought up a name for it: Mission Green. What do you think?"

"Well. Reeve's good at that sort of thing."

She put a hand on her hip. "And who isn't?"

"I guess he's just fed up with the business. Still." Cloud shook his head. "He was mistaken to quit Shin-Ra."

Tifa's eyebrows rose. "After everything they've done? I wouldn't've expected that from you."

"Simple. Rufus won't shape up—not for keeps, anyway. Now we've got no way of knowing what he's up to."

"Well, that's the big idea. If we got a new organization off the ground, one with any weight to throw around, keeping Shin-Ra in check is what we could do." She lowered herself down on the sill and crossed her arms. "Bug in your glass or what? I just washed it."

"I'm listening. It's not a bad drink, Tifa. Look through it a certain way and it's like autumn, or maybe copper smelted over everything."

"Halfway making good on Yuffie's prediction you'd hole up writing bad poems about the cruel world, I see."

"As a matter of fact. This one I call, 'She's Waiting and Has Large Hands,' dedicated to nobody in particular. Remember that." He cleared his throat. "'I heart you. Yes, it's true. I heart you. Yes, I do. When you go away? You make me blue. I wish you'd stay, or I'll throttle you.'"

She screwed up her mouth and let it hang like there was a bad taste in it.

"Worked real hard on that," he said.

"Uh-huh. Real cute."

"All summer, I'm saying. With my giant crayon."

Her lip started to twitch, and she fought to keep from grinning or laughing, because the point of it was that he'd irked her. "Well, I guess it's safe to say now. The longer you were gone, the more I thought you'd come back bent out of shape about something." She lifted a shoulder. "Silly of me, I guess."

He opened his mouth and pinched it shut in a pained look. He drank. "The thing of it is," he said, in that over-thinking voice he used, "I can go someplace without needing my hand held. I can look out for myself. Nothing new."

"But are you doing yourself any favors? You weren't doing so hot when you got here, you know. You know what happens when you downplay a problem? You downplay yourself."

"Reading those books again."

That caught her off guard. Her knowing posture fell into a slump, her voice into a mumble. "I just like to understand the people I'm dealing with a little better."

"So help me out. I figure you're an expert, seeing as you've filled up a whole bookshelf with the stuff. Tifa, I don't get it. I go someplace, and you don't like it. I show up, and all of a sudden, you're telling me I'm a shut-in. Anything I want to do, you act like I'm wasting my time. It's over; we both saw to that. So maybe you're the one who needs to learn to come off it."

"Sorry. You know, I didn't realize it looked that way."

A groove deepened between his eyes. Most of the time, he left it at that.

Not tonight.

"Come on, Tifa, you want to put some book in here—you know, any one of them's just as well. Let's see." He pulled a book with a glossy black jacket from the shelf and waved it over a shoulder; she could see the muscles in his arms tensing, maybe to throw it, but he didn't do that. "This one, it's not even the worst." He flipped through the dog-eared pages and clapped it shut. "Recognize it?"

"Yeah."

"So which is it?"

She swallowed at the rising lump in her throat. "_Living With Strangers_, right? Something like that."

He slipped the book back into the gap from which he'd pulled it. There was nothing vicious or sudden about the movement, rather he took care doing it. When he turned back, his eyes had an unbearable sheen on them. "You tell me who's the stranger."

Her heart ached. "You don't understand," she said, "how much I want to know you."

"You know me better than anybody."

"You're hard on me. Hard on yourself. I know you don't mean to be, but you are. And all I want is the reason. I think—well, I think it'd make it easier for me."

He gripped the edge of the wet bar with one hand and pinched the bridge of his nose with the other. She heard him let out a breath, one that sputtered with frustration. He'd meant what he said earlier about looking the other way—he always meant what he bothered to say—and probably didn't understand why she couldn't do that for him any more.

"Tell me what you're so afraid of," she said, "because it's starting to scare_ me_."

"I'm not really. That mess back there, I can't help that. Doesn't have to mean anything, doesn't mean you need a whole library to make sense of it." He let the hand fall away and lifted up for a look at her. "Why do you leave that stuff where I can see it?" Beneath the disappointment, the husky murmurs he used whenever he was upset, she could only guess at a cold rage; nothing moved him to speak like raging. "I know if you thought I was half as bad as the titles on those things, you'd run screaming to Barret or somebody."

"Maybe I'm here for a reason."

"If you're mad at me, you should've said something. I would've left you in peace a whole lot sooner."

"But saying anything's such a trap. Pressing you gets me nowhere but on your bad side." She cut the air with a hand. "I don't want you to leave, so what am I supposed to do?"

He crossed the den in a jack-knife stride that sliced with every step. Her stomach twisted the closer he drew to the door. "I don't want to talk about it. Why would I?" He swerved back around, sending her a look from askance that sharpened into something accusatory. "I thought you had answers for everything. When you're trying to move forward, talking about the past just wastes more time."

"Downplaying problems till you can forget them all together—that's what you're doing." She scowled. "And making me play along, like I'm doing you some favor."

He stopped to stare, and so did her heart stop beating, it seemed. "I don't _make_ you do anything. What do you know about being made to do anything? Tifa, leave well enough alone."

The old cowardice came over her, creeping into her thoughts, reining in movement, stifling what needed to be said.

Not this time.

"Well enough? Nothing's well at all!" The bottom of her glass hit the sill with a heavy-handed thunk, brimming and bringing her to her feet. "You want to talk about wasting time, Cloud? Maybe I'm wasting mine. How the hell do I get through to you?"

She felt like yanking him by the scruff and dunking him in the lifestream—again, again. On every upswing: _You there yet? Sorted out now?_ Between gasps for air, he'd confess otherwise in his best husky-earnest voice—the little one-note wonder—and she'd pitch him back down again.

"This is what I'm talking about! Say something. Anything. Do you understand?"

And silence, except for the banging of blood through her ears.

She lowered herself back down, pressing her forehead to drive out the darkly swirling fury. "I do want to talk. I don't mean to yell. I'm just frustrated; that's all. Just frustrated." The quick dribble of tears down her cheeks stunned her into silence after that.

"Tifa! _Tifa._"

She looked up and saw him, the boy from Nibelheim with beautiful blue eyes, the wide-open ardor in them almost painful to behold.

It had been a while.

* * *

Sephiroth dispelled the illusion of Nibelheim in order to focus. All was dark as he picked through the dwindling strands connected to every living clone. He felt each one pulse at a plodding pace before discarding it, and their combined effect was to diminish what had rattled him from his reverie.

_I'm sure it was you, Cloud._

Like an insect caught in the web of a spider, everything Cloud did spanned all distances—even death—and registered within Sephiroth a keen response. The pain interested him. The pleasures were rare. Cloud was a miserable creature but could be made to serve his purpose well.

And when that feeling flared again and he found it, it was like grabbing hold of a live wire. Teeth began to chatter, sweat sizzled on skin, hands burnt, and Sephiroth was there—the feeling of being alive and bound by a body terrible and wonderful at once.

He caught a slice of sight through Cloud's eyes and saw the girl. What was her name? Ah, yes. Tifa—no less in tears.

Sephiroth couldn't control Cloud any longer—not outright, at least—but he was free to laugh at Cloud as he pleased. What had that little fool won but the chance to ruin all he cherished? And now he didn't even have Sephiroth to blame.


	4. The Tie That Binds, And Binds, And Binds

"I'm sorry, Tifa. You were right. I'm making this harder than it has to be. Tifa? Please don't—"

"Cry, Cloud? What, can't I be sad for once? Look at us!"

There wasn't enough whiskey in stock in that whole damn bar to drown this kind of feeling—this feeling of having everything in reach and nothing at all. She covered her face in a last-ditch effort to smother the coming sobs.

All of that caged anger came flying out of Cloud. He brought down a forearm and smashed through the countertop, clear into the cupboards—again, again—all without so much as pausing for the pain.

"Cloud!"

"Zack. _Aeris. _Don't you see? She's dead. My mother—all of them." Loose drywall dusted him white. Now he was gritting his teeth for another go. "I won't lose you, too." The crack was maybe bone, certainly the cabinets that came loose and toppled, scattering their contents across the tiles.

"And my father, is he dead because of me? What are you saying? Just think about what you're saying! Stop it, Cloud."

She rushed to seize him as he reared back again, closing him in her arms, and together they dropped to the floor littered with busted porcelain and boards and shook like the children they were, once more in this backward embrace where he belonged, broken as he was, to her.

"Tifa." He'd run out of breath.

She rocked back and forth and kept murmuring for him to stop, hush, sleep, long after he had stopped and the air had cleared. No matter how tight she drew him in the circle of her arms, he slid and slid as if to sleep, deflating with every breath, until his head rested in her lap.

"I meant you shouldn't have to worry," he told her. "That's all I really meant."

_Good going!_ She was terrified. "You can talk to me about anything. Stop sitting on what's bothering you all the time."

"I should get up, then."

"Funny."

He stared at the ceiling. "Out there, in here—everything's a mess. I wonder how much I can fix," he said at last, "and if I'd feel better for it."

She jogged him gently on a knee. "Listen, I have a better idea. Let's be happy. Tell me—no, _promise_ me you'll try."

No sooner than she invoked that word, he pulled upright. He was thinking about it too hard. Promises hadn't served him well.

"Another mission, you could call it. Well? Do you accept?"

"I'll try." He pulled her up and started scouring the wreckage, pushing aside plywood with the instep of his shoe. A certain vigor had returned and woken him from the nod-along daze that had troubled her ever since they finished the bar, so maybe the solution was to keep him distracted. Or enraged. Well, it must've come as a great relief to let it loose, and she decided she shouldn't feel so bad for egging him on.

When he came back up with the cactus, she groaned.

He caught her eye from sidelong, a bit too slyly for her taste. "It's coming to me now."

Little hobbies. What did it matter, as long as he included her in them, and she was a good enough sport to feign interest? She liked to see him smile.

"Hold it," said Tifa. He was prodding the beginnings of a bruise on his shoulder. "Let me see."

"Nothing bad."

"Let's pour a potion on that."

"Waste of money," he called after her, but she was already in her bedroom, searching through drawers that rushed her with smells and bittersweet memories when she opened them.

He stood there enduring her ministrations, his head turned aside. When she was done, she let her hand trail down his arm. "I do like what I see. By the way."

"You should get out more," he said. "Also, I'm going for a shower now."

She heard the water heater kick in and gulped a good portion of her drink then and there, sagging to the sofa in defeat.

She could snap like her body was begging her and accuse him of playing dumb to spare her feelings, because she was pretty sure that was what he'd been doing all along. But the truth was that there was no telling with him, and he was right about those books: no book in the world was going to begin to scratch the surface of their bizarre ordeal. Did he want to talk about it now? Did he want to talk about it later? At all?

_You've got to help him, Tifa._

But how? She'd roamed through the mess in his head and come out the other side, having gained so little insight that months later it startled her to realize it. She'd found proof of his natural existence, true, and a childhood longing for her so fierce it flattered and unsettled her—yet all she was left with was a thousand burning questions she couldn't ask for fear of driving him away.

And never mind where she fit in. An ugly truth had emerged over the course of his absence. It was that low-down part of her that said, _You owe me for this. I put you back together and not for anybody else, not so you could leave me._ Well, it looked like she hadn't done such a bang-up job of that. But it was this part of her that persisted in petty jealousy on nights when he was gone, this part that was loath to thank her dear friend for her sacrifice because it hurt Tifa's pride to think she'd won by mere default.

_And won what, exactly?_

He was gone.

"I'm going away," she'd said in Gongaga. Aeris. While Cloud lay in bed like a dropped doll, innocent of whatever had possessed him, poor Aeris sported the faded ring of a black eye and a busted lip, two of about twenty places where he was supposed to have struck her.

The away team had showered cures on Aeris' battered body and hurried to Gongaga where Tifa and the others awaited them. That night, Aeris looked determined—almost serene. "I know what I have to do now," she said.

Tifa had come to Aeris because of something about herself that she'd been forced to admit that night: she would believe in Cloud against all reason. She wanted to hear Aeris say, "He'll kill you, too," and if that didn't release her, nothing would.

"Tell me. Did he—?" Her voice was a toneless whisper, the kind people used for the worst of secrets.

"You're a good friend, Tifa."

She shook her head in a flash of anger. "Don't speak so soon. You don't know what I do."

"I know you're confused. I was that way, too, before I really understood."

"You're going, aren't you?" The one person who maybe understood this mess. Going. What did the Planet have to say for itself?

Aeris looked at the hands folded in her lap. Her face wrinkled a bit. She nodded with a measure of finality that would haunt Tifa in dreams—and tried to smile.

They'd gone on their little date first at Gold Saucer, beating Tifa to the punch, and Tifa had just convinced herself she was happy when her friends were happy, no matter what. Now she roared like a madwoman and cracked the table under her fist. "Don't you _do_ that to him!"

This was too much.

Aeris winced. "It's not him, Tifa. That wasn't him."

"What do you know? All you do is lead him on, and now you're just going to leave? I thought better of you; you couldn't care less!"

And both of them were on their feet like they meant to go at it, only the cracked but still-standing table between them. That was when Aeris' mouth crumpled up like a little rosebud.

Tifa wasn't sure when she'd stopped making fists.

"Please," Aeris said, "take that back. You really don't understand. I wouldn't want you to be sorry."

"For what? I've had enough riddles, enough surprises!"

"That's just the thing." Aeris covered Tifa's hand, a part of Tifa that throbbed like the rest of her, pain so bright she could remember every word, every detail of this moment in a hut with a thatch roof that sighed in the breeze. "You never know what's going to happen next. We're friends, Tifa. Please, let's always be friends."

_What am I saying?_ Tifa buried her head in her hands. _Why would I want to put her through any more pain after all she's gone through? What kind of person does that?_ "I'm sorry." It sounded plaintive and wretched, and Tifa hated that part of her that counted on Aeris to be more forgiving than she was herself. "God, I don't know what's—no, just that I'm terrified. I don't know what to be angry at any more."

"I'm counting on you," Aeris said. "It'll all be over soon, and he'll need you. I promise I'll take care of the rest."

_Help him? I'm part of the problem._ Whatever Aeris had known that night, that part of Tifa always knew who'd be left to pick up the mess.

* * *

Tifa caught up with Cloud in the darkened corridor leading to the rooms. Fresh from the shower, he was dressed and aglow like a ghost in the dim.

"So how'd it go with Zack's parents?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Didn't have much to tell them. Guess I just wished I'd had something nice to add."

_Five years._ She was struggling to make sense of him, wary of overstepping. So many questions. "Aeris really loved him, I think. Must've been more than your average guy."

Cloud paused to wet his lips before they touched the rim of his drink. "Yeah," he said, and she watched him drain the glass.

She uncapped the bottle she'd brought along and refilled it. "Go anywhere else? Sort of under the impression you'd be gone maybe a week, tops." She pushed through the bedroom door, glancing over her shoulder. "Really could've used your help on opening night."

"Went to see Elmyra," he said, "and Nibelheim, too, for a while. That's all."

_Tell him what you told me_, the little boy in the lifestream had said. _He'll probably be so happy._ "You know, I've been meaning to show you something. I know it's a bit early for a birthday present, but I think you'll get a kick out of it." From beneath the dust ruffle of her bed, she pulled out a long pine rifle box and flipped the latches. She lifted the scrapbook from the crushed velvet lining and sat on the foot of the bed. "I never told you this, but every time I got my hands on a paper after you left—" She laughed at herself. "Well, I checked to see if you'd done something big and noteworthy like you were always promising."

He slid a hand down his face and spun around, groaning as if he'd go back through the door.

"Oh, come on. Be a sport about it."

He sat next to her and opened the scrapbook to the first page. "_The Amazing Anals of AVALANCHE_," he read, straight from the headline of her favorite clipping, egregious typo and all. He put down the book and gave her a funny little smile. "I didn't realize they were that far up our asses with a camera. Did you?"

The laminated pages flashed as they turned beneath his fingers. "_Barret Wallace is a man of few words_," he read, and both of them snickered. "Pretty sure I could count them."

She turned the page and tapped the picture of the villa Cloud had bought in Costa del Sol during their journey, most likely just to prove he could. It had once belonged to none other than President Shin-Ra. "Yuffie sent this to me just last week."

He narrowed his eyes. "What's wrong with it? I was just there the other—hey."

"Look close." The picture was a little unfocused, and she watched him squinch up his eyes in an attempt to decipher it.

"Eff, yoo—" He broke off with a scowl. Somebody had spray-painted a love note on the stucco.

She was nearly eating her knuckle to keep from howling.

"_Fuck you, Shin-Ra._ Great. I see that. On my house." His tongue moved around behind closed lips, like he was working a particularly sour lozenge.

"Back in a second," she said. "I'm fetching another bottle."

He watched her from the corner of his eye as she rose, stretched, reveled in the fact. "That's good, Tifa. This ought to be interesting."


	5. Sans Green

As Cloud flipped through the pages of the scrapbook, Tifa was aware of how close they were sitting and how much she'd missed him. The feeling was an all-body buzz that wouldn't let up. She got to thinking he was here to stay this time—in curious proportion to the amount of whiskey she drank—and hoped she wasn't kidding herself.

Somewhere into the second bottle, along the stretch of seconds, the phone chirped and gave her a start. Cloud beat her to it with ease, reaching flat across the bedspread and swiping it from the nightstand. "Barret," he said, by way of greeting as much for the sake of her curiosity.

Barret was seeing about business in Corel, one continent and timezones away. Tifa could hear his full-throated voice like some loudspeaker droning in a dream. She rolled her glass along her forehead to cool off, exulting in the earful Cloud was getting.

And deserved.

He'd learned to be impervious to it, of course. "It's my birthday soon. One year older and none the wiser—yeah, I guess you could say that. If you had it out for me." He listened for a while, pulling no faces, the perfect straight man to Barret's usual bluster. "Funny you should say that. I was just reading about how you're a man of few words—to the point I can fill in the rest of this conversation. I'm handing off the phone now. Doesn't mean I'll stop thinking about you, though. Kisses."

Barret's chuckle filled the earpiece like a mouthful of dry gravel. "Well, well. Look who's back. You all right, I guess?"

"I'll say."

"I need to drive down there and supervise? You drunk as hell."

She swiveled her eyes for a look at Cloud, and what she saw threatened to draw around the rest of her.

Cloud was hunched astride the bottle, squeezing it by the neck and thumbing the slick curvature between swigs.

"Working on it," she said—breathy, even to her own ears.

"You be smart, girl."

"I know."

Cloud blew a long note across the top of the bottle, bending to do it. Fine hairs along her nape and arms stirred at the hollow sound.

And there was a sense of happening, happening, when nothing was happening at all.

"Don't be letting him jerk you around. I know the shit he pulls. I don't want to hear about no babies coming out of this mess between you two. Did I say mess? Damn right I did. Hell, you ain't stopped whining and fuming about it for weeks."

She watched Cloud's lips close around the mouth of the bottle and heard his teeth clink against the glass. He drew back, and a gossamer string of saliva spindled and snapped. He looked at her just once through a canopy of fallen bangs and huffed. _What is he—?_

"It's hard," she said.

Did the whole room shudder or did she?

"Visitin' with Marlene this weekend. You want me to drop by? Half a mind to straighten this out myself."

Tifa smiled. "You could get a look at the bar. All done, you know. Well, actually, bit left to do, what with some problems upstairs." One wet bar, recently wrecked. "But, uh, that'd be great."

"Uh-huh." She could picture Barret from miles away, crossing his arms, jutting his chin—dubious, of course. "I'll just call, then. Sure as hell don't want to be taking anybody by surprise."

They said their goodbyes, and she set aside the phone.

Cloud wiped the back of his glove across his mouth. "I'm pretty limber," he said.

She gave herself over to giggling.

"I could probably manage it," he said.

"I think you're going to have to."

"Huh. Better start practicing." The bottle settled on the nightstand with a careful clink. Other than looking flushed, his movements were fluid as ever, his speech unslurred. Maybe he wasn't as boozed up as she'd thought he was, only weird.

Weird as ever.

"Just when I think I've seen it all, you go and perform lewd acts on a bottle of liquor. And yet here I sit. Please add these things up for me."

"Doesn't." He broke open the scrapbook, sinking against a hand. "Want to know something funny, Tifa?" He caught her eye from sidelong—coolly, briefly. Turned the page.

"If you think it's funny? Oh, boy."

"I don't like it when you talk on the phone. I did it to be an ass."

Her heart beat fast. This wasn't romance, but it was something. "Did you really?"

"So much for it. Never mind the fact I've been gone all month." He waved off the rest, as if annoyed by himself.

She lay back and let out a breath. "Do you think we're bad for each other?"

A pause. "I'm all right." A firming of the lips. "Making do. And you?"

"I've been afraid for months now. I thought it would go away."

Next page. "So maybe I ought to go."

She shot up and clamped down on his wrist. "No." She let go, a little embarrassed. But it was truth, and so much else pushed to slip her censor. Why couldn't she be more assertive? More like Aeris, who'd had a way with Cloud, a way of teasing him open like the petals of a flower. "You know what? I'm tired of not saying what I mean. We've been through too much for that."

"Could be worse. Try saying what's on your mind and making no sense."

"Know what we decided? Aeris and I."

"No. Not sure I want to, either."

"Either you're dense as a brick, or you've got a real funny way of being considerate of other people's feelings. That's what. So which is it?"

The scrapbook snapped shut. "Huh," he said, after an inordinate amount of deliberation. He could be so exasperating—that night they'd slept beneath the anchored Highwind, for starts. With near and certain death looming over them, she'd expected him seek her out for comfort, if nothing else.

"It's getting to me, Cloud." She flopped backward in a sprawl. The creak of the bedsprings seemed to mock her frustration.

"You're all right," he said.

She turned her head on the mattress to consider him. She wouldn't tell him she wasn't. It should have been obvious.

"You're better for it," he said.

"God, what's that supposed to mean?" She lifted a hand and let it drop. "You run off doing whatever it is you do. I keep thinking, 'Come back. Stay this time.' Don't you ever stay anywhere?" She bolted upright to beseech him. "It's not supposed to be like this."

He had a way of shrinking under scrutiny that made it clear he wasn't thrilled about the direction of the conversation—though he did sort of smile. "Pretty stupid, aren't I? Considerably stupid. Stupidly considerate. So there's your answer."

"Come on, what don't you like here? Tell me and I'll—I'll fix it, Cloud."

"Yeah. I guess I've let this go on longer than decent." He let out a sigh, then rubbed the back of his head. "See, well, I—" He winced. "Tifa?"

Her hands were clasped, her shoulders hitching up in girlish anticipation. "Yeah?"

"I'm completely gay, is the thing."

"You _what?_"

"Ever since I put on that dress—"

"No, no, no. There's just no way. See, I'd've _noticed_—"

"I fought so hard, believe me. But it was no use. It was like my pinkie had a mind its own, the way it kept turning up all the time. Now I just want to dance the night away and drink cocktails, the ones with fruit in them."

She brought her fist down like a gavel on the mattress. "Not funny!"

He started laughing.

She boxed him in the upper arm. Hard. "You little _creep._" She reached for a pillow and caught him upside the head with it. Too bad it wasn't full of rocks. Bricks. A bludgeon would do. "You're terrible," she told him. "A real jackass."

He hoisted up the scrapbook to fend off the namby-pamby assault, getting one last look around the cover before she could scrap the pillow and just miss elbow-dropping him in the face. "I know all about the anals of AVALANCHE," he said. "Jealous?"

Raucous laughter floated up to them through the floorboards. What Cloud had said—well, that was the punchline, and the people downstairs were laughing at her; all the world was laughing at her. She wished he'd just stop stringing her along and say what he really felt. _I hope you're done rutting after me like some bitch of a dog_, he'd tell her, _because I don't like you the least bit. How stupid can you be?_

And she'd be grateful to hear it. Grateful.

"Tifa?" He got up on an elbow and frowned.

"Just go on and plead drunk. Maybe you're right." She swallowed and reclaimed the pillow, hugging it against herself. "I see how it is, you and me. You don't—" She couldn't even bear to look at him. "Maybe we should just skip this part of the conversation." She kept trying to have it, and he kept doing everything to run away.

He tapped the scrapbook. "Thanks for this, Tifa." His lips shaped into a soft smile. "Sometimes I think I'd do anything to get out of this kind of conversation, including making really bad jokes. But that's not fair, is it? Let me make it up to you." He pulled to his feet and withdrew a broad brown leaf from a pocket. "Here. Look at it."

It cracked when he pressed it into her palm.

She peered between her cupped hands at the pieces, then looked back up at him. "It's a leaf." _He gave me a leaf._

"You asked me how it went with Zack's parents. We should talk more, shouldn't we? I'll try to explain." He took her on a tour of what he'd seen. "The old forest around Gongaga—remember how it was? Lush. Nasty. These days, nothing like that. Now it's all dead and drying out like a bunch of kindling. Bits and pieces of Meteor—all that funk's hanging in the air, yet to blow over, and you see what it's doing. It's keeping the sun out," he said. "So there you are, in the middle of some deadwood waiting to catch fire you used to call the thick of the forest, with not a spot of green to go by. Well, maybe you start thinking you could put it right."

"I could understand."

"Yeah. When I saw Gongaga in such a sorry state, I knew I had to do something." He looked up, and in his eyes burnt something fierce. "I'd rather fill a whole book for you," he said, "with things worth feeling proud of. It wouldn't be fighting. So maybe I can make things? Not the best things—what with the shelves, I mean—but still I've got power to make them, and I'm sure that's what counts. I want to make that forest all over again." He drew up straight and nodded to himself. "Somehow I will."

It heartened her to hear him talk about the future. He'd cooked up some cockamamie plan to do with this dead leaf and wanted her to know she had her part in it.

She sprinkled the pieces over the nightstand and sighed. "Going to be all right, isn't it? You, me—everything, I guess. No matter what."

"Before I forget."

Pushed back against the mattress, she gaped up at him, her heart a hammer, her thoughts disrupted. The sweet smell of whiskey hung between them, on his breath and her breath, but she did her best to ignore that, wrapping her arms around his nape in welcome.

He closed in for a kiss, and she poured every unsaid word into her end.

"Told you I'd make it up to you," he said. He'd broken out flushing from the whiskey or the kiss, and it made him look somewhere between fervent and febrile.

"Better be with interest."

"With interest." He sat back and looked to think for a while, and she had to laugh at that. Then he gave a small nod, as if to himself, and stooped to open the front of her blouse, working button by button with fastidious precision that had her reaching up to hasten the process, fumbling their fingers together. The flimsy fabric ripped on the last button, sending it pinging somewhere within earshot.

She giggled about it, all the more amused by how he looked honestly disturbed.

"Tifa."

_Five years_, she thought, and something else—an upshot—occurred to her. "Here." She reached behind her back and unfastened the clasps. Sprung free, her breasts had a way of destroying hesitation, yet he touched them with suspicious care. She nearly hissed at the feeling of those fleeting fingertips on tender skin.

He didn't linger there the way most men would. Instead he found the long scar across her stomach. Watching him bend to dress the old wound with brief kisses brought on a rush of well-being, powerful enough at that moment to soothe her oldest fear.

"It's time I got you out of that uniform for good," she said.

Pushed from his shoulder, the unfastened spauldron rolled over the bedside and hit the floor like a two-ton hunk of metal. She pulled up his shirt and envied the way his own scar was smaller and mostly obscured by the musculature. She touched it and watched how his eyes flared at first, then softened. Up close like this, she could count the striations in his very fine eyes or the faded freckles sprinkled like brown sugar across the slender bridge of his nose.

"You be smart, girl," Barret was always saying—for as long she'd known him. The mean streets of Midgar, no place for a pretty girl—but by then she'd felt meaner than the whole city. The refrain had born frequent repeating ever since Cloud jumped into the mix, and she'd fast grown to treat it as an ironic joke.

Life was looking up.

She kissed the side of Cloud's neck, catching warm flesh between her lips that pulsed like a vampire's delicacy—good enough to get her nibbling.

He drew back at once, rubbing at the spot. His lips were poised as if to touch a woodwind, his eyes thinning in a way that was unreadable.

She searched him for some click of comprehension. "Talk to me?"

Then he said, "Don't any more," and before she could ask why, he was on to something different. He sketched a light path down her body, from collarbone to hip, and she let out a low groan. Some great pressure between them kept lifting, lifting, all by these strokes.

But why did he keep doing that? Rearing back, as if to dodge her, as if she were pestering instead of pleasing him. She felt like she was grappling with something wild.

She sent her fingers crawling down his back, seeking proof in the closest press of their bodies. His smooth skin prickled beneath her fingers while she urged him along with her hips, grinding against him.

"There," she said in his ear, "see?"

Hissing like something punctured, he bore down atop her, hard. She knew she had him then.

And somehow reveling in that certainty brought all movement to a clenching stop. Down his back, sinew pulled taut like strings along a fingerboard. He sank against her, shuddering in her arms like something struck instead of strummed.

"Cloud." _What now? What is this?_ When he said nothing, did nothing, just lay there, she wondered if he was going to get up and leave her, the way it always happened no matter what they were doing. "Oh. _Oh._ Did you—? It's okay if you already—"

"No," he said. "But you should stop."

"Oh, Cloud. You just—" She laughed a little despite herself.

"I mean we shouldn't," he said. "Not like this."

"Look. Me and my nightclub, remember? Not some monastery. You should know we're getting to the point where I'm going to have to slug you if this keeps up."

"Yeah." His face was a tired blank. "Something's wrong."

"What?"

His eyes flicked from left to right, as if they were not alone. "I'm not sure."

He tried to draw away, but she trapped him in her embrace. Now or never. "You're here with me now," she said. "Let go."

"It isn't that easy. I wish it was. This could be a mistake."

That word was like a slap. She stubbornly ignored it. "I love you." There. They couldn't run from it any more.

He turned his head and let out a breath that might've been words.

"You don't have to say anything," she went on, but it hurt that he didn't—couldn't—even if she'd given up doubting what he felt. "I know things, too. Just try to relax."

"Let me just—" He wet his lips. "I'll show you what I mean. For now, let's don't do anything else."

"All right." She rested her arms against the mattress, working hard not to frown. Some of the joy left her as he resumed his trail of kisses across her stomach; she wondered if it was okay if he touched her this way, as long as she didn't touch him.

But it hardly mattered if the reality squared with the fantasy—no small bit thorough for all the time she'd had to dream it up, maybe a little far-fetched, too, what with the _I love you_ and the _I'm changing my ways and going into extreme detail about my feelings _bits. She'd settle for the worst sex of her life at this point just to know that she had him and worry about what that meant tomorrow.

After planting one last kiss on her hipbone, he shouldered her legs and stripped her shorts.

She dumped gently onto the mattress, realizing what he was up to with a curious mix of upset and intrigue. _Been around more than he lets on, I guess. Well, better for me._ Still she wasn't sure what to make of him now, what to make of these strange rules.

He caught her eye one last time and then went to work; he had that air about him, and before she could feel further disappointed, he bowed between her legs and her were doubts forgotten.

Muscles drew tight and lax, tight and lax, building into a rhythm. He had her pinned beneath his thumbs, curbing undulations that should've flung him for all her fervor. Her fingers curled in his hair. She couldn't believe how long he'd made her wait for so little as a kiss, only to dive right into this.

But, god, he was good at it.

Moans drifted from her, quickening into sharp intakes of breath. She rocked against him, her hips sliding through his grip, her back along locks of her unbound hair.

She cried out and both of them shuddered.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Interest.

"Oh, god." She pawed at the air for him to stop. Her head lolled to the side, hidden by a dark veil of hair, and for a while all she could do was guffaw. She felt like she'd benefited from some miracle, some incredibly normal miracle. She slid back for a look and smiled down the length of her body.

He was poised between her splayed legs with a little half-moon of a smile. Glazed. Dirty. His hair was a hilarious mess, like a hay bale put through a hurricane, with none of the usual artful negligence. "Am I forgiven, then?" he said.

"Are you kidding? Never. But it's a start."

He reset his jaw with the heel of a hand. "You see I think a lot of you, Tifa."

"Cloudspeak for something, isn't it?" He was hard and promising, but she didn't get much further than copping a quick feel before he pinned her wrists. She hadn't forgotten how strong he was, but she thrilled to the reminder—realized, too, that maybe this strength had kept him from her.

"Go on," she whispered.

"Sometimes I think I feel more than I should. About you," he said, "or anything. Do you think it's too much?"

"Hm. Guess we'll see." He'd yet to let up, so she settled for turning her head and nipping the inside of his elbow. The pulse beneath his skin beat quick before it bent from her reach.

"I won't play at being somebody I'm not," he said—with insistence that struck her a little strange.

"Not such a nice boy, huh?"

He shook his head in irritation. "You don't get it. Who do you want me to be?" He dragged a hand down his face. "I want you, I always did, but that's not all there is to it. I—"

She covered his mouth with hers to quiet him.

He broke away. "That's how you are. I know you'd rather see nothing."

"Come on, Cloud. Stop it." She remembered the last time he'd talked this way. Didn't want to. Hated it.

His morbid idea of pillow talk proceeded apace. "This thing, it's who I am. I know it because I can't get around it. Just that I don't recognize myself any more. I think we _are _strangers. I think—"

"I said stop it, damn it! Okay? You're drunk."

What an ugly lie in the middle of a moment like this one.

Sad she needed so much to believe it.

His hold on her wrists redoubled. "I'm telling you how it is. You only want to hear it when it sounds nice."

"Are you trying to scare me away? You think I'll let you do that?"

A feeling of disquiet prevailed on her in the answering silence, the idea she shouldn't speak, shouldn't struggle, that he wasn't looking into her eyes but the reflection in them—a wild thing caught up in lurid self-fascination, knowing itself for the first time.


	6. When Shall We Three Meet Again?

There were few things Sephiroth did not know, and fewer still, things he did not know and did not care to.

How did Tifa Lockhart taste? This was one of those things.

Right now Cloud was looming over her and itching under a straitjacket of self-restraint.

_He disgraces himself_. Sephiroth had no use for women, their softness and slick crevices, and he was quite sure Cloud had always been at his weakest around them. But of course Cloud would always be somebody's fool; his ongoing love affair with liabilities was the peak atop a mountain of proof he'd suffered complete brain death at sixteen.

Slipping into Cloud's body was like slipping into a well-worn coat. Comfortable, if a bit on the small side. If Cloud noticed Sephiroth's intrusion, he gave no indication, too caught up in the moment, it would seem.

Cloud was thinking,_ Has it gone too far? I promised her I'd try._

Sephiroth had put his power into these arms, had put his superior mind behind these eyes, and in his hands had once been the world. In a mood to settle, now he tried putting them around Tifa's throat.

Cloud's fingers only twitched. _No, that's not it_, Cloud thought. _That's the last thing in the world I want to do_. To him it seemed like a stray impulse, awful but easy to check, and for a moment Sephiroth wondered if he'd given up the game.

Cloud shuddered and shook his head. And there, through Sephiroth's influence, no matter how it had waned, a decision had been made. _I can't_. _I won't hurt her. What's the matter with me?_ If Cloud's body was like a well-worn coat, then his mind was a movie Sephiroth had seen one too many times. His thoughts proved tedious as ever.

"Tifa, I—" His face softened to match his whisper. "I'd break every bone in my body for you."

He backed off the bed and left her lying there. Death changed nothing. It was Sephiroth who was always by his side.


	7. Death of an Apologist

The ceiling fan completed one last listless rotation before Tifa sat up against the headboard. "You don't—?"

_Don't want me?_

_Don't like me any more?_

_What?_

Cloud said he'd break himself for her, and she wasn't sure how to argue with that. At least she'd gotten something out of the disaster.

The same couldn't be said for him.

He stood there shirtless, turning over his hands and examining his sides, as if the bare skin in these places had been stung by insects only he could see. 

_What am I doing here?_ For god's sake, she was lying here naked and he was walking away from her, prowling around the bedroom he was supposed to share with her as if an assassin might leap out at any minute. These were angry thoughts, but you couldn't wound a woman's pride like this and expect not to be a casualty.

"Look," she said. "You don't leave people lying around naked, Cloud. It's just not done. You'd better come back to bed, or I'm about to really get my feelings hurt."

"So put some clothes on," he told her, pulling on his shirt. "It could be worse."

"Just like that. This is how you want it to be? Well?" She slapped the mattress and stood. "Come on, you're downright cruel to yourself. Don't tell me that isn't the point of this."

By the time she found her blouse, he was pinching the lost button from it between his thumb and forefinger. He laid it on the bureau on his way out the door—slinking off to the bathroom to do more than just sulk, she guessed.

She rushed to catch up with him, hitching up her shorts. "At least let me watch while you take care of it. I want to learn what you like." She ended up dogging him all the way to the den, her frustration giving way the closer he drew to the door.

He surprised her by sliding down the wall beside the piano to sit. "Play for me," he told her.

The bar below had emptied out and fallen silent, the apartment into a still. It was four in the morning, and this was her life.

She looked between him and the piano. "That's it?" She rubbed her face and sighed. "Fine. I guess I can't complain." Cloud was clever in a way few people appreciated until he'd pulled one over on them. She was starting to see how he'd shut her up with kisses and placated her with what was supposed to be a compromise, but was really just a copout.

She pulled out the bench and situated herself, her shaky fingers hovering over the keys. "Any requests?"

"Whatever's your favorite."

She shut her eyes, let out a breath, and began. It had been a long time, but it was just like fighting; her hands remembered the motions, and soon the music took over. Little by little, the tension eased, and she felt herself relaxing under careful strokes of the keys.

So did he.

"We're even now," she said, "or at least according to you. I hope you're ready to tell me what happened back there."

"You think there's a word for that, Tifa?" His eyes had fallen shut, glowing faintly beneath the lids. "I used to stand beneath your window and listen to this. This song's sad for a reason."

Her mother had died; Tifa had missed her terribly.

"I wish you'd picked something else," he said.

She turned on the bench to entreat him. "I don't understand. We were _finally_," she said, "and then you—"

"I know," he said. "It isn't fair, and I'm sorry about that. I'm sorry about a lot of things—sorrier than you'd believe—but there's no putting this off and no way around it. Tifa, I've decided."

She watched him rise and filled with dread, somehow knowing exactly what had been decided. "I'm tired. Aren't you tired, Cloud? Let's turn in. Tomorrow we can fix up the mess in the wet bar. We can have pancakes and do some work on the homestead. They say the weather's supposed to be nice for once."

He said one thing, and he said it very carefully.

"No."

He had been gathering his courage to say it to her all this time, and now he let the word steep like she was going to have to get used it.

It was some damned bitter tea.

"I'm going to school to be a botanist," he told her.

She blinked twice. A botanist. He said he wanted to be a botanist. _My life. My god, my life._

Tifa couldn't help it. She started to laugh.

Cloud got his dander up in a hurry. "It's no joke, Tifa. It's what I want to do."

"You're not just going to school. You're _leaving_ me. Stop and think about what you're doing. This is crazy!"

"You asked me if we were good for each other. So here's your answer: we're not, and we both know it isn't going to work."

_This is the knife_, she thought, the knife she'd been waiting for. It left no scar and no hope of healing.

This was the way he was going to kill her.

She pounded on the piano, an angry girl who was tired of having things taken away from her. "You promised me you'd try!"

"I did try. What do you think that was back there? Why else would I come back in the first place? I'd stand out there like a fool and try holding back the whole ocean if you asked me to. But I'm all out of promises and apologies. I can't do it any more, so don't ask."

"So go to Junon. That's where you're going, isn't it? Fine. Hit the road running as fast as you can, but at least have the decency to admit you're giving up on us," she said.

"Don't think I'm going to walk out of here skipping and whistling. It isn't easy. You, me—I've wanted this as far back as I can remember; it's probably the only thing besides fighting that ever felt right."

This was no chaotic outpouring of words on his part, but worse. Logic came when you went cold, when feelings gave way to facts.

The sound of his voice was becoming unbearable. "But if there's one thing life's taught me, sometimes it doesn't matter what you want. It's about what you need. I think you and I need different things right now." He let out a breath. "And you're right there's something else. I couldn't live with myself if something happened to you," he said.

For a moment it did not click. It simply did not click, and he must have been able to tell by looking at her that she didn't understand.

This was the knife, and it was cutting him, too. "I don't want to hurt you," he said.

"Hurt me how?" she asked. "Like what you're doing right now doesn't hurt enough?"

He opened his mouth, and she thought he would answer. Instead he swallowed the words, the taste of them bitter, and turned away.

"Look at me when you're breaking up with me, damn it. You could at least do that." It was the tone she took when drunks in the bar got out of hand, a whip she cracked that could make the biggest brutes skip.

It didn't work, though. Nothing in her bag of tricks worked on him, nothing but tears, and right now she couldn't cry even if she wanted to; she was too afraid he would hurt himself again. Dimly she realized that this was unfair, but that thought fleeted as thoughts were wont to do in the course of fighting, and right now she knew she was fighting for their lives.

"Hurt me how? Those are just thoughts, Cloud. You should know by this point I've had half a mind to bash your head in all night."

"Yeah. Look who's downplaying now. You wouldn't be saying that if you heard them. Tifa, I'm trying to tell you, there's somebody inside me who's not nice_._"

A long sliver of ice stabbed through her. _Sephiroth_. "You don't mean—"

"No," he snapped. "It's not that. How could it be? It's only me, and I can't go around blaming anybody else for what's happening. It's my bed, and I'm going to lie in it. That's all there is to it."

"For god's sake, they did things to you. I don't know what exactly, and you aren't saying, but I'm guessing those weren't _nice_, either. Do you really think that's going to just go away? Do you really think you're the only one who can handle this? Are you planning to go on an apology tour for the rest of your life?"

"Look, I know I got out of hand tonight. I have feelings and then afterthoughts, and that's the trouble. If I stay here, I'll be saying sorry forever."

"You can't control yourself? That's what you're saying?"

"No. I can. I can." He was so angry he looked like he was going to cry. "I don't need you or anybody else to do it for me, either."

She'd just jabbed her finger into the mother of all sore points. It was no coincidence that he was sprinting for the door, a wounded animal she would have to be stupid or starved to pursue.

Maybe she was both.

"Cloud!"

"You're off the hook. What else do you want me to say?" He was about to explode with frustration. "I can't keep looking to you or anybody else to tell me who I am or to make me happy. The bottom line is that I don't think I can be who you want me to be, the person you deserve, until I make this right." He spread his arms. "We're talking now. Is this what you really wanted to hear?"

"I'm not waiting for you," she shouted. He needed so much work, and she loved him, and it wasn't fair. "I'm done waiting for you. Just stop, just go, just leave me alone. I want to live, Cloud, I want a life, and I'm not sorry at all!"

"You shouldn't have to wait," he told her. "This is your life, too. There's plenty of guys who don't need instruction manuals or cleaning up after. It won't be your job to make them happy, and it shouldn't be."

The knife twisted. The door shut.

For a moment she was too stunned to feel at all, and then the nerves crept back into her limbs. Maybe she could do this without him, but would he be all right without her? She threw open the door and flew down the staircase.

Downstairs, it was dark and so quiet, and the chairs were turned upside down on the tables, and the smell of cleaning spray hung in the air.

She fumbled for the light switch. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, and she wondered how long it would take her heart.

He was gone.


End file.
